South Sudan leader Salva Kiir is to seek re-election in that post rather than tackling Omar al-Bashir for the national presidency, his party says. The SPLM will instead field a northern Muslim, Yassir Arman, in the national elections due in April.

January marks the fifth anniversary of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which ended a bitter north-south civil war in Sudan. With important elections scheduled for April, women are debating and fighting for an expanded role in the new institutions of government.

This latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines violent conflict that has claimed several thousand lives in 2009. Inter-tribal fighting, while not a new phenomenon, has taken on a new and dangerously politicised character, with the worst violence in and around the vast, often impassable state of Jonglei.

The UN Deputy Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Southern Sudan, Lise Grande, has welcomed the first-ever rescue, by the Southern Sudan Police Service, of 28 abducted children in Pibor County, Jonglei State. The children, aged between 2 and 14 years, were released on late last month.

At least 43 people have been killed in clashes between soldiers and cattle rustlers in south Sudan. Women, children and soldiers were killed after fighters attacked a settlement in the Twic East region of Jonglei state, on Saturday, Major-General Kuol Diem Kuol, of the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), said.

When the women of South Sudan welcomed the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005, they were cognizant of the fact that true democracy will be realised only when their human rights are realised. It is a young democracy battling to stay afloat against the backdrop of a fragile peace arrangement. A 22-year-war rained terror on the land, and caused unimaginable levels of destruction, killing two million people and displacing four million more according to U.N. estimates.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Representative in Sudan has called on all parties to immediately cease the fighting which erupted today in the southern town of Malakal, stressing the need to ensure the safety and security of civilians in the area.

The Kenyan Equity Bank, One of the world’s first cellphone-to-cellphone cash-transfer systems, intends to expand its activities to southern Sudan by the end of the year. The system, called M-PESA, allows customers to transfer cash via their mobile phone, through an agent or store which supplies the cash. To send cash, a customer has to buy E-money which is then loaded on to his account and then he can send to a recipient who receives a text message with a code telling him to go and collect money from an agent within his proximity.

The Juba Peace Process, the two-year negotiations aimed at ending the war in Uganda, has ended with rebel leader Joseph Kony refusing to sign the final agreement. Though we've made incredible progress in the past two years, It appears that we have reached the end of the road for this process.

It is now more important than ever that we keep up the pressure on our leaders to end this war. These peace talks produced a surge of helpful attention from our leaders, and they will be tempted to now turn their attention elsewhere. Returning to the neglect and indifference of the past would have catastrophic consequences for the people of northern Uganda.

We cannot afford to have that happen. The stakes are too high.

Even though they failed to achieve a signed final agreement, significant progress was still made. What had been been labeled as one of the worst and most neglected humanitarian crises in the world just a few years ago has seen transformation. Nearly a million people began to leave displacement camps and return home and children were no longer forced to commute at night to stay safe. These gains must be sustained and consolidated.

Despite this progress in northern Uganda, the Lord's Resistance Army is now operating in the border regions between three countries: the Congo, Sudan and the Central African Republic. Abductions of young children are once again occurring, and we have good reason to believe they will only increase in the coming weeks.

As the rebel group prepares to return to war, we must urge our leaders to fight harder than ever to achieve peace.

For those of you who have worked so hard to help achieve peace in Uganda, I know that this news is extremely discouraging. But with so much progress made and so much still hanging in the balance, now is not the time to give up hope. Successful peace processes require long-term vision and persistence. Together, we can be the factor that prevents history from repeating itself. We can keep the attention of our leaders on this issue and keep pushing them to do everything they can for peace.

There are no alternatives.

After 23,000 refugees returned home to South Sudan, the United Nations refugee agency has closed two camps in western Ethiopia. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced that it had closed Bonga and Dimma camps after the organization assisted refugees to return, mainly to Blue Nile state in South Sudan. Last week’s closures bring to three the number of camps which have been emptied in western Ethiopia since last year.

The government of south Sudan might pull its deputies out of the national parliament if Khartoum does not make more progress towards meeting southern demands, the vice president of the region said on Thursday. The southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) withdrew its ministers and presidential advisers from Khartoum two weeks ago, saying the central government had failed to carry out key parts of a north-south peace agreement, signed in 2005.

The UN refugee agency has reported it was facing a critical shortfall of US$11.1 million for its refugee return and reintegration operations budget in South Sudan for this year. "We are in a very dire situation because if we don't get this additional support we will have to scale down or even halt our operations with serious consequences for all our activities," said Chris Ache, the UNHCR representative in Sudan. "I implore donors to give us the money we need to continue our work," he added.

The first sign of rain clouds for students at Tiboro School in Yeri in South Sudan means that classes are abandoned. The village school is little more than a few benches under a tree; the few textbooks available are used by their teacher Repent Khamis Eliashas to prepare lessons.

UNHCR's repatriation programme for South Sudan topped the 50,000 mark this week when a group of 84 Sudanese refugees flew to the town of Yambio from Central African Republic (CAR).

Unite States' special envoy to Sudan Andrew Natsios said in Washington DC recently that southern Sudan’s leaders were struggling to implement good governance practices, and that there appeared to be substance to allegations that some donor funds that had been allocated to development in the region had been misappropriated.

According to high-ranking officials speaking at a UNIFEM-sponsored Gender Justice Workshop for South Sudan, the government of Southern Sudan has provided policy instruments designed to protect women and girls and ensure that women's concerns are addressed. What remains to be done is translating these policy instruments into laws and implement them.

The vast majority of children and youth from the south have not received any formal schooling, and education indicators in Southern Sudan today are among the worst in the world. Formal education in the south was severely limited even before the most recent two decades of civil war.

Thousands of domestic poultry have been destroyed in and around the southern Sudanese capital of Juba in an attempt to contain an avian flu threat reported in the region several months ago, officials said. Samson Kwaje, the southern Sudan information minister, said a team had been visiting homes to check poultry and destroy suspected cases.

Can the story of happy return be consolidated into a new beginning or will the present optimism turn sour under the weight of unfulfilled promises? The south is a land for the large part without schools, hospitals, roads, jobs or a working government. Hopes of a new dawn, fuelled by a wealth of oil and gold, are tempered by fears that outbreaks of militia fighting could spill over into renewed conflict if frustration at the slow pace of change continues to fester.

An outbreak of cholera in the southern Sudanese city of Juba has claimed the lives of 59 people since the first case was reported there two weeks ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Tuesday. The ICRC said in a statement that it was airlifting 30 tonnes of emergency medical supplies from Kenya to Juba to treat those infected. More than a thousand cases of cholera have been reported in Juba, southern Sudan's capital, since 6 February, the agency said.